BJCP Privacy Policy

Your secrets are safe with us

This policy was formally adopted by the BJCP board on August 9, 2006

What this policy covers

This policy covers how the BJCP treats personal information that it collects and receives. Personal information is information about you that is personally identifiable — such as your name, address, email address, or phone number — and that is otherwise not publicly available.

BJCP policy requires that all active judges have current email addresses on file. The BJCP uses email as the primary form of communication with its members, and most competitions now send out notices solely through email.

Information Collection and Use

The BJCP collects personal information when you take the BJCP Exam, judge in a sanctioned competition where your experience points are recorded, register a competition, login to a restricted portion of our website, or perform other services related to your BJCP status. We may also collect information when you use any of our website functions, such as voting, checking your record, participating in member forums, responding to surveys, updating your address, etc. We only collect information that is necessary to support official BJCP functions.

We use your information for the following general purposes: to customize the content you see, fulfill your requests for products and services, update our records, improve our services, contact you, conduct research, list promotions and other notable achievements, and similar purposes. We provide your information to competition organizers so they may contact you to participate in their events. We may provide your information to other BJCP-approved entities where judges need to be contacted (e.g., committees, surveys, field tests).

The BJCP's use of your personal information benefits both you and the organization by allowing us to verify your identity (to keep your personal information out of the hands of others), provide you with efficient service, and update our mailing lists to eliminate duplication.

The BJCP may set and access BJCP cookies on your computer, simply in order to keep you logged into a forum or provide other normal online services.

Information Access and Maintenance

You can see and review your personal data on our web site, as well as information reported to us by competition and examorganizers (e.g., judging points, exam scores, etc.).

We will correct errors in your record when you report them to us. Contact information is updated by using our online change-of-address application. Missing points are added to your record by following the retroactive point request process.

We do not purge information from our database since we have many functions that rely on accurate historical statistics. However, we do not maintain and update personal information on Inactive judges. We also only provide personal information for active judges to competition organizers.

Information Sharing and Disclosure

The BJCP does not rent or sell personal information about you with other people or nonaffiliated companies or organizations. Member trust is considered a valuable asset. Selling member information is a violation of that trust, and we will not do it.

We may share limited information with third parties, but only consistent with the terms of this policy. We will not otherwise give out personal information such as judging records, competition reports and similar materials except as required for BJCP purposes.

We provide lists of judges to organizers of sanctioned competitions for the purpose of sending invitations, or to provide products or services you've requested, when we have your permission.

We list BJCP members with bad addresses or missing email addresses on our web site. We may provide limited personal information to other BJCP members if we believe your contact information is out-of-date, and we are trying to locate you.

When we do supply information to third parties, we restrict the data usage to BJCP-related activities. For example, competition organizers may contact you for purposes of inviting you to their competition, but they may not give or sell your information to spammers or unrelated organizations.

We may need to share some information outside of the BJCP to properly manage the program. This includes sharing to comply with laws or court orders, and includes administrative requirements such as tax reporting.

Information Security and Governance

We keep your personal information in password-protected databases on personal computers, database servers and web servers. This information is maintained by BJCP staff as part of their normal duties. Not all BJCP officers and staff have access to the databases. Only those staff members that must access or maintain the information as part of their regular duties have access to the databases. Information extracted from the databases may be shared with BJCP officers and staff upon request, if the request is based upon their regular duties.

The BJCP master database is maintained by the BJCP IT Director. Other BJCP staff regularly perform data entry, but the data is not committed to the master database without being reviewed by the IT Director.

BJCP judges have access to a read-only copy of their record via our web site. This information is password-protected. The BJCP ID and password control access to several other web site functions, including voting for regional representatives.

If you have a problem related to information security, report it to the BJCP IT Director. If you do not receive satisfaction, you can escalate to your regional BJCP representative or the BJCP President. Feedback on this policy should be given to the BJCP Communication Director. Contact information for all of these individuals can be found on the BJCP web site Officers page.

Opting out

You may opt out of our use of your personal information by informing us in writing that you no longer wish to be a BJCP member. That will eliminate (within a relatively short time) the chances of your name being provided to competition organizers, and also revoke any privileges you may have on our websites. After opting out, we will only make use of your information in a general way for historical reporting purposes.

Changes to this privacy policy

This policy statement was first published in 2006. The BJCP may update this policy. We will notify you about significant changes in the way we treat personal information by placing a prominent notice on our website.

First update: May 2007

A clarification was made by adding the final sentence in the first paragraph of the Information Security and Governance section. Although not a change to the policy, this sentence makes it plain that the information in our possession is only used appropriately within the Program by authorized persons.